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Tag: Nigel Farage

Who Funds Reform UK? The Business Interests of Nigel Farage’s Major Donors
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Article by Max Colbert republished from DeSmog.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Credit: Reform UK / YouTube
Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne aren’t the party’s only big money backers.
Crypto billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each recently piled £36 million into Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s political party.
The story amplified recent scandals about the party’s donors, with scrutiny mounting over the funding of Farage and his outfit.
In light of these recent developments, DeSmog has taken a closer look at the financial interests of Reform’s donors, to understand which sectors have been backing the party and why they’re interested in bringing about a Farage government.
Delo and Harborne made their money from the cryptocurrency sector, but DeSmog’s analysis shows that they – and Reform’s other major donors – have business ties spanning far beyond this one industry.
Farage’s party has taken substantial amounts of money from members of the Sunday Times Rich List, fossil fuel interests, the landed gentry, property developers, offshore investors, and has been forced to return large sums to those who aren’t allowed to donate to UK parties.
Meanwhile, campaigners and MPs continue to push Andy Burnham’s Labour government to stop a few super wealthy individuals from bankrolling our political system.
The Major Players
Excluding Reform’s new £72 million windfall, more than 72 percent of all recorded donations to the party since the 2024 election have come from just three people, including Delo and Harborne.
Harborne, who has lived in Thailand for 30 years and is worth £18 billion, is comfortably Reform’s biggest backer, having given £15 million to the party since the last general election (£47 million including his recent donation) and £25 million (£57 million) since the party’s launch in 2019.
Harborne is also responsible for a controversial £5 million undeclared personal gift to Farage prior to the 2024 general election, which is the subject of an investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner.
Delo, co-founder and former executive of the crypto trading platform BitMEX, is behind a further £8 million, while venture capitalist David Grainger has given £1.4 million.
Major donations have also been received from Reform treasurer Nick Candy, and telecoms and fintech magnate Bassim Haidar, who have collectively donated a further £1.7 million since the last general election.
Billionaire venture capitalist Sasan Ghandehari has also pledged to donate millions to the party. Though these sums have yet to materialise, he has already given over £50,000 to Farage personally.
The Crypto Barons
If the new Delo and Harborne donations are deemed to be legal, Reform will have received 90 percent of its funding since the last general election from those with ties to the crypto industry.
Harborne is a shareholder in Tether, the world’s largest ‘stablecoin’ provider, which is based in El Salvador. Tether is currently seeking an injection of private capital that would increase its value up to $500 billion – making Harborne one of the richest men in the world.
The company has ties to Donald Trump’s U.S. administration and has reportedly benefitted from the crypto-friendly policies of his regime.
Delo, meanwhile, is one of the co-founders of the crypto trading platform BitMEX. He was one of those who pled guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations for failing to establish and maintain an anti-money laundering scheme at the company. Delo was fined $10 million and served 30 months’ probation in Hong Kong, before later being pardoned by Trump. BitMEX was ultimately fined £100 million.
Reform UK donor and crypto billionaire Ben Delo.

Credit:
Jkhildreth / Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
But they aren’t the only Reform donors with an interest in the crypto industry. Farage’s backers also include Maria Rost, behind some £130,000 across nine donations to the party, who is understood to be the wife of U.S. crypto investor John Rost, as well as Oscar Townsley, founder of Bitcoin derivatives trading platform A1X, and London-based investor Simon William Smith.
Farage has repeatedly lobbied for the industry, promising to bring about a “crypto revolution” if he becomes prime minister. He announced flagship proposals for unleashing the sector at the Bitcoin conference in May 2025 in Las Vegas, including tax breaks and government support, although the document has now vanished from the party’s website.
Farage also lobbied the Bank of England to drop plans for a state-backed stablecoin, a move that would suit Harborne – his most generous patron – by blocking a rival to Tether.
Reform was until recently the only major political party in the UK to accept donations via cryptocurrencies, having been accused of using a third party to turn crypto into cash and obscuring the original funding source.
Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer introduced a temporary moratorium on crypto donations earlier this year, which campaigners say should become a permanent ban.
Offshore Interests
As previously reported by DeSmog, a large part of Reform’s funding comes from those with offshore business interests.
Since the last general election, 57 percent of its income has been donated by individuals and companies featured in the Offshore Leaks database, which details information about more than 810,000 offshore companies, foundations, and trusts.
A large number of the party’s donors are also international investors – people or companies with significant financial interests abroad. In the second quarter of 2026, prior to the £72 million windfall, Reform received £5 million from 17 different international investors – including a Monaco-based former Lehman Brothers executive, an investment firm in business with the UAE, and a New York-based asset management firm linked to the owners of Chelsea Football Club.
The party has been embroiled in controversy after an undercover investigation by Verbatim Investigations, broadcast by Channel 4 in September, appeared to show the party conspiring to accept donations from foreign sources.
Two of Reform’s most senior figures have now resigned following the documentary, though both deny wrongdoing – as does the party. The Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation into whether any laws were broken.
Farage has previously said that he wants to win back high net worth individuals to the UK through a £250,000 “Britannia Card” that would allow wealthy foreigners to buy a 10-year residency permit and enter a special tax regime. Labour has called the policy a “billionaires bonanza” and tax experts have estimated it would cost the UK £35 billion over five years in lost revenue.
Fossil Fuel Interests
As reported by DeSmog in April, Reform has received two-thirds of its funding to date, not including the £72 million, from fossil fuel interests. A further £2.4 million has been donated by individuals who have publicly disputed basic scientific facts about climate change.
Harborne owns AML Global, which supplies aviation and maritime fuel to a distribution network that includes “main and regional oil companies”, according to its website.
The price of jet fuel has spiralled since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, which would benefit Harborne’s business interests.
Although Harborne doesn’t deny climate science, and recently called the issue an “existential threat”, Reform’s senior figures frequently dispute the contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming and support the mass expansion of fossil fuel production in the UK.
Fellow Reform donor Jeremy Hosking had $440.8 million (around £326.5 million) invested in oil and gas companies via his hedge fund Hosking Partners as of March – an increase of more than 50 percent from the previous three months.
Meanwhile, Reform-controlled councils have been axing net zero commitments and stating their intention to withdraw from climate emergency declarations. Farage has claimed it’s “bonkers” for carbon dioxide to be considered a pollutant.
Property Developers and Financiers
More than half (55 percent) of Reform’s corporate donors are connected to the construction, property, and development industries, which would stand to benefit substantially from the party’s policies. Of the 40 companies recorded as having donated to the party before June this year, 22 were involved in this sector.
Reform’s 2024 manifesto promised to “unleash” housebuilding across the country and “restore landlords’ rights” by reducing their taxes. Reform’s housing spokesperson and deputy leader Richard Tice is a property industry millionaire, having run the Sunley Group, a company founded by his grandfather.
Reform treasurer Nick Candy is also a property magnate, having made his money selling luxury homes to the super rich. Candy recently sold his Chelsea mansion for £265 million – the most expensive residential property in UK history.
The party has also received extensive funding from financiers. Reform’s donors include hedge fund manager Johan Christofferson, who has given £200,000 to the party, the “vulture fund” Greybull Capital, and the disgraced City of London titan Crispin Odey.
Although Farage has threatened to impose higher taxes on banks, he has also promised to deregulate the sector – including by removing regulation introduced after the 2008 financial crash.
Reform UK treasurer Nick Candy.

Credit: FII Institute / YouTube
The Rich List
As recently reported by DeSmog, Reform’s donors include aristocratic families, the owners of exclusive London clubs, peers, and members of the landed gentry.
The annual Sunday Times Rich List acts as “the definitive guide to the wealth of the UK’s richest people”, cataloguing the country’s 350 most affluent individuals and families. The entries in the 2026 edition share a combined wealth of £784 billion. Nearly a third of them no longer live on the British mainland.
Four of Reform’s donors appear in this year’s list, two of whom appear in the top 10.
Harborne ranks at number six, while the Reuben family – another Reform donor – sits at number two. The Reubens have donated to Reform through a private investment firm – Investors in Private Capital Limited – which is ultimately controlled by Omaha Business Holdings Corp, owned by the family and based in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven.
Reform’s donor list also includes a number of old money backers. Among them is Fiona Cottrell – the daughter of Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton. Under her maiden name, Fiona Watson, she was a former glamour model and one-time girlfriend of King Charles III when he was the Prince of Wales.
Cottrell has given £500,000 to Reform via Britain Means Business, a company owned by the party’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, and £750,000 directly to the party. The Metropolitan Police is currently investigating the majority of these donations. Cottrell has repeatedly declined to comment when approached by media outlets.
Fiona’s son George Cottrell – nicknamed “Posh George” – is part of Farage’s inner cadre, having been UKIP’s head of fundraising and later Farage’s chief of staff. George, who was previously convicted of wire fraud after being arrested by undercover U.S. agents while attending the 2016 National Republican Convention with Farage, has also provided direct financial support to the Reform premier.
Cottrell helped to fund Farage’s anti-immigration campaign videos in 2023 and 2024, supplied him with security, and allowed the Reform leader to use an office in his five-storey London townhouse, which overlooks Buckingham Palace. Farage didn’t declare these gifts, and falsely claimed that he hasn’t received any support from George since being elected to Parliament.
Reform and policy advisers associated with the party have proposed reducing taxes for the wealthiest, paid for by dramatic reductions in state benefits for lower-paid workers and the disabled.
Impermissible Donors
Another feature of Reform’s fundraising record is the vast number of impermissible donors who have attempted to give money to the party over its relatively short existence.
Reform has been forced to return donations worth more than £295,000, on 83 occasions, since its founding in 2019. Farage’s party had to reject more unlawful donations in 2025 than any other party, including donations from Monaco, Jersey, and Germany. The party ultimately had to give back £200,000, and their benefactors made up 18 of the 23 donors turned away by UK politicians or parties during the year.
Labour’s Response
Labour is in the process of introducing a new law that would set a £100,000 annual limit on the amount that foreign donors can give to political parties.
It’s unclear if Delo and Harborne’s latest donations will fall foul of the new rules, which are currently being debated by Parliament – given they have, at least until recently, been living in Hong Kong and Thailand respectively.
However, in the meantime, campaigners and MPs are urging Burnham’s administration to strengthen the legislation by introducing a £100,000-a-year cap on all donations – including from those based in the UK.
The government has been facing pressure from the trade union movement not to introduce a blanket cap, which would limit its extensive financial contributions to the Labour Party.
After donating his latest £36 million, Delo said that he wants to create “a level playing field” between Reform and other major political parties. However, the data shows that his and Harborne’s donations would tip the scales heavily in Reform’s favour.
Last year’s accounts for political parties, published by the Electoral Commission, revealed that Labour received £44.6 million, the Conservatives £30.9 million, and Reform £31.9 million. If Reform is able to receive the full £72 million, its 2026 income would likely be far ahead of the other parties.
Delo also cited Labour’s income from trade unions as a reason for his philanthropy. However, since 2020, Labour has received almost £43 million from the unions – whereas, in roughly the same period, Delo and Harborne will have given over £100 million to Reform.
What’s more, trade unions raise money from individual workers’ membership fees. The Trade Union Congress, a federation of trade unions across the UK, represents roughly 6.6 million people.
Speaking at the annual TUC conference in Brighton in September, its leader Paul Nowak said: “The evidence is clear: Reform UK is a party for sale. Nigel Farage is a politician for sale. And given half the chance, they’d sell our country down the river.
“Make no mistake, this is a crisis for our democracy. We cannot allow our political system to be captured by corporate interests.”
He said there was no similarity “between care workers chipping in a few quid a year through their union and a party bought and paid for by billionaires” – adding: “We need a proper conversation about how we clean up our politics that doesn’t push workers to the margins – but does stop the super-rich corrupting our politics.”
Article by Max Colbert republished from DeSmog.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Reform UK 2025 Ltd’s Nigel Farage says it’s probably best to forget to mention that their sposor made his mega-fortune facilitating serioius crime by providing global money-laundering services.
Nigel Farage is scathing at the £250,000 cost to the taxpayer of his unnecessary and ridiculous Clacton-on-Sea election campaign that he caused to avoid scrutiny and acccountability for the £5MILLION ‘gift’ that he didn’t declare.
13 October 2026
Polanski’s Greens created prime minister Burnham. Holborn could yet undo him
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Article by Russell Warfield republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
Labour Party candidate Sagal Abdi-Wali takes a selfie with supporters | Toby Shepheard / AFP via Getty Images
Labour is celebrating the by-election result, but it must not misread a tight win for a total victory
Yesterday’s Holborn and St. Pancras by-election was the latest in this year’s trilogy of high-stakes by-elections. In June was Makerfield, when Andy Burnham successfully ran for Parliament to displace Keir Starmer as prime minister. But the vote that secured the path to his premiership came four months prior, in Gorton and Denton, when Labour’s National Executive Committee blocked Burnham from running. The Greens were victorious, pushing Labour into a distant third place. Had Reform, which came second, won that seat, the Starmer electoral strategy would have limped on: able to continue to tell itself that the path to 2029 victory lay in flipping mythical Labour-Reform swing voters. The NEC would not have reversed its decision to allow Burnham to run in June, and the Parliamentary Labour Party would have remained paralysed, seemingly incapable of acting to remove Starmer. Prime minister Burnham – and Labour’s leftward lurch – is a direct consequence of Zack Polanski, and the shock he delivered to Labour’s left.
If the Green wave crested at Gorton and Denton in February, the Holborn and St. Pancras by-election was framed as the rocks into which it risked crashing. At a surface level, critics have been vindicated by a Green loss, Polanski achieving 33% of the vote to Abdi-Wali’s 45. In one sense the Greens are a victim of their own staggering success: swelling to a peak of 22% in the polls early in the year, and pushing Labour and the Tories into third and fourth respectively. Burnham’s resulting rhetorical commitment to a break from neoliberalism goes beyond what even Jeremy Corbyn ever said as Labour leader. The effects unleashed within the volatile electorate (of which around 30-40% reliably vote for precisely what Burnham is promising) were predictable, hitting the Greens hard in the immediate term. It is commonly assumed, however, that Burnham’s honeymoon will not last forever as the gap between rhetoric and reality widens over time. One wonders how the result might have panned out a year from now. Or indeed, in just a couple of weeks, after a budget trailed to contain some of the proverbial “difficult decisions” which forever plague our ruling class.
Holborn and St Pancras, a seat that has been held by Labour since its creation in the early 1980s, was not an obvious target seat for the Greens. Had a by-election taken place in some of the capital’s other constituencies, such as Hackney or Lewisham, Polanski could have started recruiting parliamentary staff from the moment it was called, but he was never likely to win in Holborn. Nevertheless, in the face of the Burnham bounce and the damp squib of the Greens’ Manchester mayoral election earlier this summer, Polanski was compelled to recapture the initiative and throw his hat in the ring.
As a result, this by-election was the latest in a series elevated to the highest reaches of national politics. This one, however, has been subjected to a misreading. The prevailing narrative surrounding the poll was the question of whether the Greens would meet electoral oblivion. Could this be the end of Polanski?
In the mouths of opponents, the question took the form of wish fulfilment; politicians and pundits who spent the last year on studio sofas pining for the days that the Greens were friendlier, more serious, less angry, actually cared about the environment, or whatever else. The barely veiled subtext to all of these complaints was that they preferred the Greens when they languished at about 5% in the polls. For Polanski to be discussed as even having a political career to “end” is a new problem for a prominent Green, and a good problem to have, attendant upon the greater power and platform he has earned the party. At previous elections, the party’s leadership figures would often dutifully achieve a commendable fourth or third place, and carry on in the full expectation of running again next time in hope of improving their result; the future of their so-called political career was never called into question. Nor was it for Nigel Farage, who tried, and failed, to run for Parliament many times.
The future of Polanski and the Greens were not, however, the real stakes of this election. Instead, it was the future of the country. Given that Polanski was a necessary precondition of prime minister Burnham and his political programme, the ability of Labour (and the political class in general) to tell itself that the Green pressure from its left has been alleviated gives political space for Labour to revert to type: triangulation, capitulation and feeding the far right.
A Green victory would have benefitted the 30-40% of the country who want a proper break from Thatcherism: full nationalisations, wealth taxes and redistribution, rent controls and price caps. Burnham’s ambition is now compromised without an ascendant Green Party pushing him further, while the political centre of gravity has swung towards the most right-wing composition of the Parliamentary Labour Party in our lifetime. We now find ourselves in something like the alternative timeline in which Reform won in Gorton and Denton. Evidence of this will shortly present itself. The decision to approve new oil and gas drilling, for example, was reportedly delayed until after the by-election. If the government now gives it the green light, we will be given a decisive indication of its complacency regarding the electoral threat from its Green left.
Such complacency would be misplaced in the long run. In reality, the Greens remain in strong electoral contention. Yes, the party will have dared to dream about running Labour much closer. But to come within a few thousand votes of winning one of the safest Labour seats in the country, when Burnham is at his peak and the Greens arguably at their lowest ebb, is not the decisive vanquishing of Polanski of which his gleeful gravediggers are boasting. In 2024, the Greens won just 10% of the vote in this seat. Today, Polanski achieved a Green swing of 22% to triple the party’s vote share. In dozens of constituencies, a swing of that size would have resulted in a Green MP.
On the other side of the coin, Labour’s majority in the seat has been reduced by more than 6,000 votes, at the height of Burnham’s bounce. Labour will overlook that and be rightly pleased with this result. But it would be a mistake for the party to conclude that the threat from its left has been eliminated. If Labour reverts to isolating and ignoring the Greens, it will only strengthen Polanski’s position by the next general election.
Article by Russell Warfield republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
How the Greens are forcing Labour’s hand on Gaza
ByAndrew Feinstein 9 Oct 2026
A progressive alliance is now critical to counter a Farage government
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.
Ed Miliband claims that he and Andy Burnham have reformulated Blair’s triangulation strategy. Their new formulation entails acknowledging that they were wrong on Israel and Palestine but entails doing absolutely nothing about it and continuing exactly the same policies hoping that you’re too stupid to notice.
11 October 2026
Greta Thunberg Is Taking Sweden to Court Over Climate Crisis Again
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https://novaramedia.com/2026/09/22/greta-thunberg-is-taking-sweden-to-court-over-climate-crisis-again/
Greta Thunberg. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP
Her youth-led group has raised more than £180k to fund the lawsuit.
Greta Thunberg and Swedish youth climate organisation Aurora are suing the Swedish government over its failures to tackle the climate crisis.
While Sweden has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions at a rate faster than the EU average, the country is not on track to meet its own target of net zero by 2045.
Thunberg said on Monday that Aurora has filed a second lawsuit, arguing that Sweden is failing in its legal duty to protect its citizens – especially children and the young – from the effects of climate change.
The group is demanding that Sweden take action to limit global warming to 1.5C by cutting emissions and protecting ecosystems like forests. A third demand involves accounting for emissions that it says are currently excluded from government calculations such as burning imported biomass.
“Sweden, as a rich country with high historical and current emissions, has a legal duty to lead the climate transition,” the group wrote in its fundraiser. “A safe and just world is still possible, but only if rich, high-emitting states like Sweden stop violating their duty to protect people from the devastation of the climate crisis, and start transforming their societies before 2030.”
…
Atrticle continues at https://novaramedia.com/2026/09/22/greta-thunberg-is-taking-sweden-to-court-over-climate-crisis-again/
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
24 September 2026
Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record
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Article by Dr Zeke Hausfather republished from Carbon Brief under a CC license.
Stormy seas: CHROMORANGE / Bruno Kaegi / Alamy Stock Photo
This year’s so-called “super El Niño” is entering into record-breaking territory.
Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific now equal the previous daily record set in 2015 and will likely keep rising in the days ahead.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in the Pacific that reshapes weather patterns around the world and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
The current El Niño event – which has been underway since June and is expected to last until next year – has been developing faster than any previous event on record.
The strength of an event is tracked using the “Niño 3.4 anomaly”, which measures how much warmer sea surface temperatures in a section of the central Pacific are than average.
As of 19 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region stands at 3.07C, putting it in a statistical tie with the previous record of 3.08C.
Some scientists, using a different baseline for calculating the anomaly, have already called the new record.
Either way, this is remarkable, in part because of how early in the calendar year it is occurring. El Niño typically peaks in the winter months, most commonly in November or December.
Every strong El Niño on record has continued to strengthen after mid-September – and there is every reason to think that this one will as well.
(For more on El Niño, see Carbon Brief’s recent interactive explainer.)
Record territory
El Niño events are typically classed as “weak” when the Niño 3.4 anomaly reaches 0.5C, “moderate” above 1C, “strong” above 1.5C and “very strong” above 2.0C.
For this year’s event, the Niño 3.4 anomaly has now reached 3.07C, which puts it in a statistical tie with the record set on 18 November 2015, set during a “very strong” El Nino event.
The chart below shows how the strength of the current El Niño (red line) is dramatically outpacing both 2015-16 (blue) and another “very strong” event in 1997-98 (light blue).
Daily Niño 3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies, 1982-2026, each relative to a centred 30-year climatology (ONI convention). Chart by Carbon Brief.
To analyse the developing El Niño, Carbon Brief followed the convention of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Oceanic Niño index (ONI).
ONI is calculated by subtracting the latest 30-year average temperature in the Nino 3.4 region from daily sea surface temperatures. This approach allows for the most recent years to be compared against the most recent 30-year period. It removes much of the influence of longer-term, human-driven warming from the index.
(While meteorological organisations typically track changes to ONI on a three-month rolling average basis, Carbon Brief’s analysis looked at how the metric is changing on a daily basis.)
If ONI is calculated using a baseline of 1991-2020 then the current El Niño has already set a new record.
Since the start of June, El Niño’s strength has been greater than any other year. In early September in both 1997 and 2015, anomalies were around 1.9C – more than one degree below where they are this year.
An alternative index
There is another commonly used metric – the relative Oceanic Niño index (RONI) – used to study El Niño.
Introduced by NOAA in 2024, the RONI index adjusts for tropical ocean warming linked to human-caused climate change. To do this, it takes sea surface averages in the Nino 3.4 region and subtracts out temperature anomalies observed across the tropical oceans (between the latitudes of 20 degrees north and south).
This approach may better remove the influence of climate change in this specific region, but can also diminish the apparent strength of strong El Niño events, such as the current one, which extend well outside the Niño 3.4 region.
The chart below shows daily RONI values, which are record setting for this time of year, but remain below an all-time daily record set during the 1982-83 El Niño event.
Daily relative Niño 3.4 (RONI) anomalies for every year, 1982-2026. Chart by Carbon Brief.
RONI stood at around 2.5C in mid-September, some 0.7C below the 1982 record.
However, that record was set in late December, at the peak of the event.
The 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 events added between 0.5C and 1.9C to their RONI values between mid-September and their peaks.
On track to smash monthly and seasonal records
Because daily El Niño values are noisy, scientists typically turn to monthly or seasonal averages to compare El Niño events.
The latest full calendar month for which data is available – August 2026 – had a Niño 3.4 anomaly of around 2.45C. This is higher than the peak of every prior El Niño event on record except 2015-16 – where the anomaly reached 2.75C – and 1877-78, when the anomaly sat at around 2.7C, based on a reconstruction of sea surface temperatures using sparse ship data.
The figure below shows the monthly evolution of the five strongest El Niño events on record alongside 2026, as well the current forecast from 14 seasonal forecast models.
Monthly Niño 3.4 anomaly (degrees C) for the five strongest El Niño events on record, for 2026 through August and the 2026-27 forecast across 14 models, each relative to a centred 30-year climatology (ONI convention). Data from NOAA CPC, Copernicus C3S, ECCC and JAMSTEC. Chart by Carbon Brief.
Taken together, the models project a peak monthly anomaly later this year of around 4.1C, with 80% of the 674 individual model runs falling between 3.4C and 4.6C.
Every single model run peaks above the 2015-16 record. The projected margin over that record, some 1.3C, is larger than the entire gap between the strongest and fifth-strongest El Niño of the past 150 years.
Some caution here is warranted, however. No seasonal forecast system has ever been verified against an event of this size, because none has ever occurred. The models also predicted temperatures slightly warmer than observed this summer, with real-world observations for August coming in around 0.3C below forecasts.
However, all strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter – and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too. If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.
El Nino’s effect on global temperatures typically lags rising ocean temperatures in the Pacific by several months, so most of the impact will be felt in 2027 rather than 2026.
Carbon Brief’s most recent “state of the climate” quarterly analysis found 2026 on track to be the warmest or second-warmest year on record. The next update in early October will examine what a record El Niño means for 2027.
Article by Dr Zeke Hausfather republished from Carbon Brief under a CC license.
El Niño: Indonesia fire emissions in 2026 ‘on track’ to match record for this century
Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather
Analysis: What are the causes of recent record-high global temperatures?
State of the climate: First quarter of 2020 is second warmest on record
Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
22 September 2026
Ben Delo: how Reform’s record donor created a ‘magnet for money laundering’
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Article by Nathaniel Peutherer , Lawrence Marzouk republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Britain’s record donor made his fortune from a crypto exchange that asked few questions of its customers
In brief
- Man who recently pledged £36m to Reform was convicted of failing to maintain proper money-laundering controls, before being pardoned by Trump
- The platform demanded little more than an email from customers for long periods and as a result became a lure for dirty money, the US government argued
- Delo pleaded guilty to one offence and other allegations, including fraud, were not tested at trial
When Ben Delo handed Reform UK £36m last week to become the biggest donor in British political history, a flurry of articles quickly followed seeking to explain exactly who this so-called “crypto billionaire” was.
Most told some version of the same story: Delo is an Oxford graduate who co-founded the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, became Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire at 34, gave millions to philanthropy and, along the way, fell foul of an obscure US financial law.
By and large, the articles did not dwell on that last part. Delo himself has described his offence under the Bank Secrecy Act as a “spurious blip”.
But US court records we have examined, building on reporting by Democracy for Sale, raise far more troubling questions about the business that made Delo his fortune. The prosecution’s wider case extended far beyond the single offence Delo admitted. Those allegations were disputed by Delo and BitMEX and were never tested at trial.
Documents filed by US prosecutors said Delo’s decisions turned BitMEX into a “magnet for money laundering and criminal activity”. They said the company processed trillions of dollars of transactions for its customers. For much of this time, they were required to provide nothing more than an email address. “No real name or other advanced verification is required,” trumpeted the website.
A document filed by US prosecutors ahead of Delo’s sentencing
The FBI said BitMEX, in which Delo owned almost a third of the shares during the period covered by the case, deliberately kept these requirements loose in order to drive up revenue. Delo personally intervened to help customers dodge restrictions on US trading, prosecutors claimed.
BitMEX generated more than $1.3bn in revenue during the five years covered by its criminal case, with prosecutors describing Delo as a “critical organiser and leader” of the “criminal decision” not to install the required safeguards.
In 2020, the US Department of Justice charged Delo and three other BitMEX executives with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain proper anti-money-laundering controls. Meanwhile, the US derivatives regulator, CFTC, brought a civil action against the founders and five companies behind BitMEX.
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In response to the DoJ’s charges, Delo pleaded guilty to one offence as part of a pre-trial plea agreement in which the US government agreed not to prosecute him over other alleged offences it had investigated. At the sentencing, prosecutors set out this wider case against Delo, much of which was refuted by his lawyers who argued that his role was not compliance-related, but neither case was tested at trial.
Delo’s lawyers told us: “There is no truth in the serious allegation that our client was guilty of the types of improper, unlawful or criminal conduct that the DoJ crowed about but did not even try to prove.
“The prosecutors’ unproven references to money laundering, sanctions evasion and fraud were irrelevant to the charges brought against Mr Delo and were put forward purely for prejudice and no attempt was even made to evidence or otherwise substantiate them in court.”
Reform UK and BitMEX did not respond to our requests for comment. Nor did co-founder Arthur Hayes, whose own defence relied on similar arguments to Delo’s.
Delo, the “D” in BitMEX parent company HDR Global Trading, co-founded the company in Hong Kong in 2014 and, as chief operating officer, built and oversaw the exchange’s trading software. US regulators later said all three founders worked together on critical decisions.
After receiving a pardon from Donald Trump in 2025, Delo said “a legal wrong has been righted”, claiming he and his co-founders had been “sacrificed for political reasons”, referring to the Biden administration.
While Delo’s “crypto billionaire” label comes from the value of his stake in BitMEX during its height, the size of his wealth today is much less clear.
The current rules governing political donations are clearly not fit for purpose
Tim Picton, Spotlight on Corruption
But certainly the company described by prosecutors as a “platform for money-laundering” made Reform’s largest donor extremely rich. Prosecutors said he and his two co-founders each withdrew between $100m and $150m in dividends between 2014 and 2020.
Tim Picton, senior advocacy adviser at Spotlight on Corruption, told us: “Political parties should be required to check a donor’s source of funds before accepting any large sum of money.
“In the age of mega donors who have derived their wealth from loosely regulated sectors such as crypto, this is urgently needed alongside a cap on donations.”
Before BitMEX even launched, its founders were discussing how much they really needed to know about its customers. The answer, initially at least, was as little as possible.
“Basically just valid email address until we feel significant pressure to do otherwise,” said co-founder Arthur Hayes in an internal message to Delo in November 2014. And for years, that was all users needed – with BitMEX’s own website advertising this fact to prospective customers.
Prosecutors argued that without knowing who was behind an account, BitMEX was ill-equipped to check whether the bitcoin flowing through it belonged to an ordinary trader, a hacker, a darkweb marketplace or someone in a sanctioned country. Nor could it report suspicious customers to the authorities.
The upshot, prosecutors said, was that BitMEX became “in effect, a money laundering platform”.
Regulators in the US demand tighter customer ID controls than this – so BitMEX banned US customers. But it also launched what it described as a “hidden service” on Tor, a web system that obscures the user’s location.
A document filed by US prosecutors ahead of Delo’s sentencing
Delo admitted that BitMEX recorded logins from users known to be in the US and “did not immediately act to restrict [their] trading”.
In October 2018, Delo said BitMEX had frozen roughly 2,000 accounts associated with restricted jurisdictions, but not those in the US. When one valuable customer was caught logging in from a US territory, Delo instructed a colleague to “tell them to log in from Canada like they normally do”.
Delo’s lawyers said such examples gave a misleading picture of his wider conduct, producing evidence of hundreds of occasions on which he personally restricted US-linked users. Judge John Koeltl acknowledged that Delo had been “actively involved” in enforcing controls on US customers. He said BitMEX had introduced procedures over time to exclude US customers and “did screen out a considerable amount of business from United States customers”. But he said that “given the admittedly wilful nature of the violation, the crime remains a serious one”.
They said the exchange used distinctive bitcoin addresses, making funds easier to trace, and said BitMEX had an “excellent track record” of cooperating with US law enforcement.
Comprehensive identity checks for all customers were not introduced until 2020, by which point the “significant pressure” Hayes had anticipated had arrived. Prosecutors argued BitMEX had started strengthening controls only after US regulatory scrutiny in 2018; BitMEX disputed this, saying it decided to do so independently in 2019.
The US Attorney’s Office later described BitMEX’s restrictions on US customers as “toothless or easily overridden” in pursuit of its ultimate goal: US money.
At BitMEX’s corporate sentencing in January 2025, Judge Koeltl found that US users accounted for about $2bn in deposits and $155m of the exchange’s revenue.
For years, BitMEX knew remarkably little about many of its customers. It turned out that some of them had good reasons to want it that way.
FinCEN, the US Treasury’s financial crime regulator, identified at least $209m in BitMEX transactions, including from unregistered money services and so-called darknet markets, where drugs and counterfeit goods are bought and sold. BitMEX settled this case without admitting or denying the findings.
Among the criminal customers linked to the BitMEX, prosecutors cited Elliot Gunton, a hacker from Norwich who had been convicted as a teenager for accessing the personal information of thousands of people as part of the notorious 2015 TalkTalk cyberattack. Prosecutors said Gunton had an account linked to BitMEX.
There is no suggestion BitMEX was involved in Gunton’s hacking or that Delo knew who he was.
FinCen found that in October 2018, the company identified more than 40,000 accounts registered in the US; US territories; or US- or UN-sanctioned countries such as Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea or Sudan; as well as people logging in from Quebec. Delo’s lawyers told us that because he was not a US citizen and the companies were not US companies they were not “bound by US sanctions law when acting outside the US”.
Delo also had dealings with Sam Bankman-Fried, years before the entrepreneur was convicted of fraud.
Court papers describe how in December 2018, BitMEX blocked an account belonging to Bankman-Fried’s trading firm Alameda Research over US activity. By then, prosecutors said, it had traded from the US for more than six months without providing onboarding documents and deposited more than $100m into its BitMEX account.
Sam Bankman-Fried was helped by a BitMEX employee to overcome his company’s log-in banMichael M Santiago / Getty
When Bankman-Fried contacted Delo, he was put in touch with an employee who recorded that Alameda was “very appreciative we took care of their US log-in ban this week so quickly”. The employee then encouraged Bankman-Fried to move the account to a non-US entity, settling on the British Virgin Islands, despite prosecutors saying there was “no indication” Alameda stopped logging in from the US.
BitMEX maintained that Alameda supplied BVI incorporation documents and later provided evidence that its authorised traders lived outside the US. At sentencing, the Judge accepted a government calculation that counted Alameda’s deposits as coming from US customers, rejecting BitMEX’s broader challenge to the way US customers had been identified.
Prosecutors said the episode showed BitMEX knew US crypto traders could easily circumvent its restrictions.
When BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same breach of the Bank Secrecy Act in 2024, US attorney Damian Williams said the absence of meaningful anti-money laundering controls had opened the exchange up as a “vehicle for large-scale money laundering and sanctions evasion schemes”.
BitMEX’s issues with regulation were not confined to its dealings with its customers. As a crypto company, it had a banking problem.
So in 2015, the prosecution alleged, it acquired a Hong Kong company called Shine Effort before quickly transferring it to Delo for $1. Although Delo owned the company on paper, they said, he was holding it on behalf of the true owner, BitMEX.
Assisted by Hayes, Delo opened an HSBC account in Shine Effort’s name. Prosecutors alleged that he and Hayes presented Shine as an independent IT company.
Documents filed by the US attorney against BitMEX
Sentencing papers filed by prosecutors even allege that he, Hayes and another executive doctored internal BitMEX documents to present to the bank. More than $100m subsequently passed through the account.
The US Attorney’s Office later described the arrangement in starker terms. It said BitMEX, as part of its “willful evasion” of US anti-money-laundering laws, had lied to a bank so it could “pump millions of dollars through the US financial system”.
BitMEX, through its lawyers, told the court that it denied these allegations and the claims were never tested at trial. Under Delo’s plea agreement, prosecutors agreed not to bring bank- and wire-fraud charges relating to alleged misrepresentations to HSBC. Judge Koeltl said he would not consider the Hong Kong bank conduct at BitMEX’s sentencing as he believed it “too tangential” to the case; he did not rule on whether it happened.
In February 2022, Delo pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by wilfully failing to establish the required anti-money-laundering programme at BitMEX.
Delo admitted knowing Americans were trading on BitMEX, knowing this required the exchange to identify its customers and knowing its existing controls were inadequate. When asked by the judge whether he knew at the time that what he was doing was “wrong and illegal”, Delo replied: “Yes, your honour.”
He admitted that he had not acted “quickly enough or effectively enough” to stop US customers illegally using the exchange.
“It was a terrible decision, the consequences of which I have to carry the rest of my life,” he told the court.
His lawyers, however, argued that his principal role at BitMEX was technical and that he was not involved in setting compliance policies. They said he had taken “numerous steps” to deal with problematic customers, including personally restricting hundreds of accounts.
Judge Koeltl accepted that others had “more responsibility over the company’s marketing and compliance functions than Mr Delo”, BitMEX had introduced controls over time and “did screen out a considerable amount of business from United States customers”. But, he added, “given the admittedly willful nature of the violation, the crime remains a serious one”.
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Delo told the court that his guilty plea represented a “fair resolution” of the case. He was not convicted of money laundering, fraud or breaching sanctions, and was sentenced to 30 months’ probation and fined $10m.
His financial connection to BitMEX, however, did not end when he stepped down in 2020 after being charged. A 2024 court filing by BitMEX in 2024 said that he and his two co-founders still collectively owned 91% of its parent company, HDR Global Trading.
The following year, a federal judge fined HDR $100m after it pleaded guilty to the same Bank Secrecy Act offence. The money was due on 28 March 2025. On 27 March, Donald Trump pardoned the company and its founders, writing off the fine.
BitMEX settled with the CFTC and FinCEN in 2021 on a “neither admit nor deny” basis, while Delo and the other founders separately settled the CFTC case against them in 2022, each agreeing to pay $10m.
Delo neither admitted nor denied the CFTC’s allegations, except those admitted to in his guilty plea, and his $10m CFTC payment was counted as his $10m criminal fine.
What Delo has called a “blip” was also a period in which his business generated more than $1bn in revenue and paid him, according to prosecutors, more than $100m in dividends.
His fortune is now being used to boost the bank balance – and the election hopes – of Reform.
Delo’s record donation comes as parliament considers some of the biggest changes to political funding rules in years, including a £100,000 annual cap on donations from overseas voters and a ban on cryptoasset donations.
Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at Transparency International UK, said political parties relying on funding from a handful of individuals presents a “major corruption risk”.
“No politician or party should leave themselves so dependent on so few sources of funds, especially when one of them has been convicted for serious anti-money laundering failings,” he said, adding that a wider cap would reduce the risks surrounding the source of these donations and “what might be expected in return”.
Picton from Spotlight on Corruption said: “The current rules governing political donations are clearly not fit for purpose. The government must ensure that its new know your donor regime is tightened up to more closely mirror the customer due diligence checks as laid out by anti-money laundering regulations.”
What next?
- The Representation of the People Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, would introduce new checks on outsized political donations and a cap on donations from overseas voters
- We will continue to report on the crypto money flowing into British politics, contact us at info@thebureauinvestigates.com with your tips
Reporters: Nathaniel Peutherer and Lawrence Marzouk
Enablers editor: Lawrence Marzouk
Production editor: Alex Hess
Deputy editor: Chrissie Giles
Editor: Franz Wild
The Bureau has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.
Article by Nathaniel Peutherer , Lawrence Marzouk republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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22 September 2026